Dean Bobinski

by Judith Geer

I had an assistantship in the School of Information and Library Studies office, which I got after the first summer I was in the program. That was a lot of fun because - there were two of us who were student assistants - we worked with the secretaries and the faculty would all come in the office. We got to know everybody. We were answering phone calls and doing a lot of just clerical work, but you got to know everybody who was around.

The library school had been at the South Campus and then it moved, I think, a year or two before I started - it was in the late '70s that it moved. Dean Bobinski had started a couple of years before I got there. From what I observed he was able to pull things together (the school had almost folded).

He had an offer from another library school at the time that was very well established, and the UB library program was kind of no one knew if it was going to make it or not, but he chose UB because he thought it would be more of a challenge.

He was able to pull very disparate personalities of the faculty together and really create a very good school and listen to everybody's problems. He was very calm. He pulled the department together, and we could see that happening because I was working in the office. I could see what was going on and the fact that he really almost single-handedly kept things spinning in there so that the program would work.